Contents: Preface Acknowledgments ONE State Power, Cultural Dissidence, Transversal Power TWO Becoming Gypsy, Criminal Culture, Becoming Transversal THREE Communal Departure, Criminal Language, Dissident Consolidation FOUR Social Spatialization, Criminal Praxis, Transversal Movement FIVE Antitheatrical Discourse, Transversal Theater, Criminal Intervention Notes Bibliography Index
Becoming Criminal is ambitious Althusserian analysis of the criminal subcultures of Renaissance England. For Reynolds-who was, as he tells us, initiated into a fascination with criminality when he was a high school student in Scarsdale-the rogue pamphlets, anti-theatrical tracts, and repressive legislation of the late sixteenth century are not the expression of paranoia in high places. Rather, they disclose the existence of a strange 'transversal power,' an alternative, oppositional culture whose values threatened the established order and whose visionary energies continue to haunt our own world. -- Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University Reynolds has some very new and valuable reconceptualizations of the rogue pamphlets and criminal literature of the late Tudor-early Stuart period in England, and he has provided the best analysis I know of their language. He expands Felix Guattari's term 'transversal' to something far more suggestive, to point towards a conceptual and experiential expansion of boundaries. Becoming Criminal is a valuable and significant contribution to scholarship. -- Arthur F. Kinney, University of Massachusetts
Bryan Reynolds is an associate professor of drama at the University of California, Irvine.
A very useful introduction for those interested in the ways in which the Renaissance is frequently introduced to today's students... [Reynolds] is unusually attuned to the ways in which acts of speech depend upon their context and their assumed audience, and his analysis impressively focuses upon the cultural and literary importance of writing outside the canon. His book never fails to be interesting. -- Dennis D. Kezar Tennessean [Bryan Reynolds] frames his cross-disciplinary inquiry with a concept of 'transversal theory,' which offers a spatially organized understanding of how subjects empower themselves through performance (social, criminal, or theatrical) and so not only defy official ideology but also transform the conditions of their own perception and experience... Especially valuable here is Reynolds's analysis of canting language as an 'official' language used by all members of a substantially unified criminal subculture that emerged in the 1520's, continued beyond the Puritan's rise to power in the early 1640's, and was commodified and fetishized by official culture. Studies in English Literature A valuable contribution both to the study of early modern criminality and to theorizing the period's social and political relations more broadly. -- Tanya Pollard Renaissance Quarterly Becoming Criminal's transversal theory performs a valuable service in reconceptualizing early modern English criminality and linking it to some of the period's most important institutions and discourses. -- Stephen Cohen Sixteenth Century Journal
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